life under electronic conditions

Google’s new Insights for Search allows us to see what the world is looking for.

A few months ago, I wrote a post for my German blog that described Google as a global database of people’s will to knowledge and of their wishes (this of course echoes John Batelle’s famous phrase). In that particular post I then put forth a wish myself: that we receive some kind of API to access this global database of searches.

Google Insight for Search

With Google Insight for Search (”Google Trends on steroids” as Andrew Chen calls it) the search company made a huge step in the right direction. Finally, they’re giving us back some of the information we type into the famous form field day on and day off. Our information.

We can now access information about what terms are searched for when and where. This cannot be underestimated. It’s not only possible to trace whether the global search population prefers red wine or white wine. It’s also a great tool for monitoring brands, especially with the possibility to show the headlines for data points that are somehow standing out of the general trends. It also makes comparing search terms within different categories a breeze - so is this interface to the inner workings of the noosphere a dream come true?

Some things seem unfinished yet. For example the algorithm that is used to match headlines to the graphs. When I’m displaying search terms for Austria, I get headlines from Germany that seem to have nothing to do with Austria. And when I’m analyzing search terms for Germany, I get a lot of headlines from the Netherlands which even is another language. I don’t know how this is done, but it can certainly be improved.

On the other hand, what I like about this service: it does not omit results for Google’s own projects as has been the case with Google Trends for Websites. It does not deny that Knol is not a serious rival for Wikipedia yet and that the distance between Google and Yahoo is not that great (besides: that’s a whole lot of people using Google to search for Google).

A few uses for Google Insight for Search that immediately crossed my mind:

• Monitoring Brands and Corporations
• Analyzing where people using your product live
• Search Engine Optimization
• Meme tracking / Buzz monitoring
• Calculating relationships / Semantic Web
• Tracking a person’s reputation
• Looking for seasonal trends

What else could this be used for? Please add your suggestions in the comments below.

Every time I reread Marshall McLuhan, I am anew surprised how exact his forecasts from the 1960s were. Take for example the mind blowing “The Medium is the MASSAGE”, he published together with Quentin Fiore, a collage of short texts and images about the changing mediascape, which only had been fully materialized in the 21st century - with social media. There is also a download of a digital rendering of the LP with the same title on UbuWeb.

Here are five short quotes that describe some core notions of present time networked life but perhaps are a little less known that his famous “global village”. Only recently with Google and Archive.org it became clear for most of us that in the Internet nothing will be fizzling out. The famous slogan is: “Google never forgets“. But McLuhan already knew this in 1967. Isn’t it a very precise description of the Internet as an

electrically computerized dossier bank - that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early “mistakes”.

This makes clear that the change is not only about a new way of researching information, but about new forms of connectivity and sociability. The fact that many things you do online will be archived for a very long time is not about information or knowledge, but could change the way we think about ourselves and the way we act.

Maybe this next quote sounds a bit bold, but I also believe, that the Internet and especially the change that started with the popularization of social software will have revolutionary effects. In McLuhan’s words this sounds like this:

The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology - is reshaping and restructuring patterns of our social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life … Everything is changing - you, your family, your neighborhood, your job, your government, your relation to “the others”. And they’re changing dramatically.

We are not only using social software, but social software is using us. While it appears to us, that using those services and tools to perform our tasks better and more efficient than before, there is some kind of “meta-change” happening. It changes the way social change happens and the way we are influenced by technology.

Isn’t the following very much to the point in describing today’s experience of the new media scape with blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter and Friendfeed?

Electric circuitry profoundly involves men with one another. Information pours upon us, instantaneously an continuously. As soon as information is acquired, it is very rapidly replaced by still newer information. Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move … to the mode of pattern recognition.

In this quote, McLuhan can be read as pleading for a new media education, which seems to be a field of growing importance nowadays. What happens when our children are not only educated by people they are able to interact with face-to-face, but who are mediated by digital technology?

Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now all the world’s a sage.

And of course, he stresses again and again the need to develop new tools for understanding today’s world and the infeasibility

to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools - with yesterday’s concepts.

Unfortunately, whenever I’m looking for example at academic sociology, nothing much seems to have changed. Too many people trying to examine the networked reality with the old concepts of mass society.

Want to know which venture capitalist invested in which web 2.0-company? Take a look at Crunchbase. It’s all there. And the best thing is: it has a beautiful and responsive API. I couldn’t resist downloading a few entries from this database to visualize the network of investors and companies that’s evolving around the new microblogging and lifestreaming tools.

So, here’s a network map of the most important companies offering microblogging or lifestreaming services and their investors. The companies are symbolized as green circles and the funding organizations as red squares (click to enlarge). It’s interesting how Ron Conway connects Seesmic, Twitter and Pownce with his investments. The rest is not exactly heavily linked by funding streams. Next will be a visualization that also shows the amount of money raised and the size of the companies.

See also these network graphs by Mikko Kivelä and Bemmu Sepponen displaying the links between companies and people of the whole Crunchbase.

There is some kind of a social media bubble. Not as much in a financial sense as in a conceptual sense. If you’re (over)using Friendfeed, Twitter, Wordpress, Wikipedia etc. you slowly begin to believe that this is the world. Maybe a bit larger than Silicon Valley, but no more than a global village.

Many Startup enterprises are trying to sell solutions for problems created by other startups’ products. And in the line, there’s the next startup waiting to tackle the problems this new solutions generate. Of course, I am living in this social media world and so, the whole thing doesn’t look half as gloomy. Summize has been no more than a fix for one of Twitter’s shortcomings - it had no search. But, don’t forget, it has been a solution to a Twitter problems.

The number of people on this planet having Twitter related problems still is small.

So, instead of incrementally looking for solutions of solutions of solutions, the foremost task should be to expand the bubble. The task is to find “real-life” problems, that can be tackled with Twitter, Friendfeed and the like. Problems, that can be better be handled with social software than with other means. This would really be crossing the chasm.

Of course, the punchline is, that with more and more people using social media because even a mainstream user is able to integrate “the entire experience into his life/work”, as Alexander van Elsas just remarked on Friendfeed, more people have social media related problems that call for new incremental solutions (see above).

And more than that: it’s not only about integrating social media into daily life, this sounds like social media were some kind of a foreign body that has to be integrated. No, it should be an enlargement of your experience, something that gives you an indispensable addition to your life. Your real life.

And with this enlargement/extension thought, we’re back with Marshall McLuhan who once said that all media are extensions of human senses. Social media has the potential to be an extension of our social senses and not just a Silicon Valley fad.

The crucial difference between old mass media and new social media lies in the network magic, services like Friendfeed are able to perform.

One thing should immediately be evident if you’re using the FFSixDegree tool I coded yesterday: the real power of Friendfeed as a communication infrastructure is its network effect. Even if you are subscribed to no more than a handful of people, you are able to receive updates from a lot more people.

Take for example example Steve Rubel. He’s only subscribed to 79 other Friendfeed users. Is his timeline quiet? Doesn’t have to. If he did not switch off FOAF notifications, he could get updates from up to 10,521 people depending on direct contacts liking and commenting on their friends’ posts.

And while Robert Scoble’s 3,130 subscriptions may sound overwhelming, this is even more true for the 34,441 people he can potentially listen to via his direct contacts. That’s what I would call hyperconnecting.

Don’t forget that this network effect not only holds for your subscriptions, but also for your subscribers. While in the world of old mass media like television or print, an audience of 100 is just that: an audience of 100. But in the world of social media, an audience of 100 can mean that 10,000 are receiving your message relayed by the direct audience of 100. What a difference a network makes!

A final remark: While the general rule is, the more friends you follow, the more friends-of-friends (FOAF) you can reach all in all, this effect is weakening when you’re reaching very high numbers of friends. Your network will eventually become saturated. This illustration shows this point:

On the x-axis is the number of direct friends while the y-axis tells how many friends-of-friends you can reach overall. Some users are a bit more efficient in their selection of friends, some contacts lists are (informationally speaking) redundant.